Write an article on water scarcity
Answers
Answer:
Water scarcity is the lack of sufficient available water resources to meet the demands of water usage within a region.
It already affects every continent and around 2.8 billion people around the world at least one month out of every year.
More than 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water.
Water scarcity involves water stress, water shortage or deficits, and water crisis.
While the concept of water stress is relatively new, it is the difficulty of obtaining sources of fresh water for use during a period of time and may result in further depletion and deterioration of available water resources.Water shortages may be caused by climate change, such as altered weather patterns including droughts or floods, increased pollution, and increased human demand and overuse of water.
A water crisis is a situation where the available potable, unpolluted water within a region is less than that region's demand.
Over the years, increasing population, growing industrialisation, expanding agriculture and rising standards of living have pushed up the demand for water. Efforts have been made to collect water by building dams and reservoirs and creating ground water structures such as wells. Recycling and desalination of water are other options but cost involved is very high.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
However, there is a growing realisation that there are limits to ‘finding more water’ and in the long run, we need to know the amount of water we can reasonably expect to tap and also learn to use it more efficiently.
It is the human nature that we value things only when they are scarce or are in short supply. As such we appreciate the value of water once the rivers, reservoirs, ponds, wells, etc. run dry. Our water resources have now entered an era of scarcity. It is estimated that thirty years from now, approximately one-third of our population will suffer from chronic water shortages.
The increasing demands on fresh water resources by our burgeoning population and diminishing quality of existing water resources because of pollution and the additional requirements of serving our spiralling industrial and agricultural growth have led to a situation where the consumption of water is rapidly increasing and the supply of fresh water remains more or less constant.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
It may be maintained that the water available to us is the same as it was before but the population and the consequent demand for water has increased manifold. The consequences of scarcity will be more drastic in arid and semi-arid regions. Water shortage will also be felt in rapidly growing coastal regions and in big cities. Several cities are already, or will be, unable to cope with the demand of providing safe water and sanitation facilities to their inhabitants.
Indicators of water stress and scarcity are generally used to reflect the overall water availability in a country or a region. When the annual per capita of renewable fresh water in a country or a region falls below 1,700 cubic metres, it is held to be situation of water stress. If the availability is below 1,000 cubic metres, the situation is labelled as that of water scarcity.
And when the per capita availability falls below 500 cubic metres, it is said to be a situation of absolute scarcity (Engelman and Roy, 1993). These are also the fundings of a study conducted by the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI). This concept has been propounded by Malin Falkenmark on the premise that 100 litres a day (36.5 cubic metres a year) is roughly the minimum per capita requirement for basic household needs and to maintain good health, roughly 5 to 20 times that amount is needed to satisfy the requirement of agriculture, industry and energy.
Plz mark as brainlist